by Calculated Risk on 12/15/2016 05:19:00 PM

Larry Kudlow is usually wrong and frequently absurd, as an example, in June 2005 Kudlow wrote "The Housing Bears are Wrong Again" and called me (or people like me) "bubbleheads".

Homebuilders led the stock parade this week with a fantastic 11 percent gain. This is a group that hedge funds and bubbleheads love to hate. All the bond bears have been dead wrong in predicting sky-high mortgage rates. So have all the bubbleheads who expect housing-price crashes in Las Vegas or Naples, Florida, to bring down the consumer, the rest of the economy, and the entire stock market.

I guess I was one of those "bubbleheads"!

In December 2007, he wrote: Bush Boom Continues

There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong. It’s not going to happen. At a bare minimum, we are looking at Goldilocks 2.0. (And that’s a minimum). Goldilocks is alive and well. The Bush boom is alive and well. It’s finishing up its sixth consecutive year with more to come. Yes, it’s still the greatest story never told.

Note the date of the article. The recession started in December 2007!

Note: At the beginning of 2007 I predicted a recession would start that year - made it by one month.  It seems I'm always on the opposite side from Kudlow of each forecast - and one of us has been consistently wrong.

In 2014, Kudlow claimed: "I've always believed the 1990s were Ronald Reagan's third term."

In that piece, Kudlow was rewriting his own history.  Near the beginning of Clinton's first term, Kudlow was arguing Clinton's policies would take the economy into a deep recession or even depression.  Kudlow was wrong then (I remember because I was on the other side of that debate), so he can't claim he "always believed" now.  Nonsense.

Also in 2007, Kudlow wrote: A Stock Market Vote of Confidence for Bush:

"I have long believed that stock markets are the best barometer of the health, wealth and security of a nation. And today's stock market message is an unmistakable vote of confidence for the president."

Well, maybe Kudlow had a point ... but not for the President he was writing about.

Now Larry Kudlow will be the new administration's chief economist.  Oh my.